How to Write Perfect Cold Emails with GPT-4 (Full Guide)

One of the hardest parts of running outbound sales or cold email outreach is writing the content itself. In this article, we will cover how to automate the writing of full emails using AI, or in this case, ChatGPT.

Let's dive into it!

Is ChatGPT good at writing cold emails?

Let's test the quality of ChatGPT's email writing capabalities with a simple prompt to start. Depending on how it performs, we'll make edits and adjustments until we are able to get an amazing cold email out of ChatGPT.

Let's start!

Prompt #1) Write a Cold Email

So let's start with a simple prompt to write cold email:

Write a cold email selling LeadLoft to Michael Scott, who works at Dunder Mifflin.

Here's what ChatGPT came up with:

If you’ve read our guide on how to write cold emails, you’ll know this is about as bad as a cold email can get. It’s too long, too sales-y, and almost feels like a newsletter.

So far, it looks like ChatGPT isn't great at writing cold emails on its own, but maybe we can make it better by giving it some instructions. Let's give it a test.

Prompt #2) Write a Cold Email + Instructions

Now let's try writing a cold email using ChatGPT, but this time we'll add some instructions pulled from our blog on how to write cold emails.

Write a cold email selling LeadLoft to Michael Scott, who works at Dunder Mifflin, and follow these instructions:
- Keep it really shortUse a casual tone
- Personalize the first line with a compliment
- Avoid jargonAvoid buzzwords
- End with a question
- Don't use emojis
- Space out the email so it's easy to read

Here's what ChatGPT came up with:

This email is already so much better than the first. It's well-spaced, written in a casual tone, and ends with a question. For all intents and purposes, this is better than most cold emails you might find in your spam folder. But let's not settle for mediocrity. Let's see if we can use ChatGPT to write amazing cold emails.

Prompt #3) Write a Cold Email + Instructions + Template

I really don't think I can push ChatGPT much further than we already have by simply using prompts. So let's try using templates and then ask ChatGPT to write new emails built off of those templates that we know work.

To start, we'll be using the templates from our cold email template resource. It includes nine unique templates to choose from, so let's just pick the one we like the most. 

Here's the cold email template I chose to go with:

This cold email is extremely well-written. It opens up with a compliment and personalization, has an extremely short body, provides value within the body, and has a casual tone. Even better, it ends with a really short and concise call to action. Many of these traits that make this email great were missed by ChatGPT, so let's see if by using this template as a starting point, we can make equally as good emails using ChatGPT.

To start, you can see there are sections that are personalized to your company or to the contact.

Let's update those so it's really easy for ChatGPT to know where it needs to make additions.

To do this, I replace all “<>” with “{{}}”.

Here’s what that looks like:

Hi {{FirstName}},

Came across {{Lead.Name}} and noticed {{personalized compliment}}.

We help {{soft pitch}} so I figured it made sense to connect. We actually just {{half sentence case study}}. Let me know if this is something you’re interested in. If not, happy to connect and {{provide value}}.

Mind if I send over a few times?

Best,
{{Sender.FirstName}}

Now let's build the prompt that will feed in the ChatGPT to update this email and personalize it for us. To do this, we need three parts to this prompt: instructions, context, and email template.

Here’s the Prompt:

Instructions:
- Here's a cold email template.
- Use it as a guide to write cold emails.
- I added instructions into the template inside of curly brackets.
- Fill in any part of the template with curly brackets.
- Use the template as a guide and don't get too creative.
- Use a casual tone.Keep the email short.

Context:
- From Zack Olivas, who works at LeadLoft
- To Michael Scott, who works at Dunder Mifflin
- LeadLoft is a sales automation tool used to book more meetings with potential customers.
- LeadLoft recently helped Fundopolis book more than 100 meetings in 2 months.
- Dunder Mifflin is a paper company.

Email Template:

Hi {{FirstName}},

Came across {{Lead.Name}} and noticed {{personalized compliment}}.

We help {{soft pitch}} so I figured it made sense to connect. We actually just {{half sentence case study}}. Let me know if this is something you’re interested in. If not, happy to connect and {{provide value}}.

Mind if I send over a few times?

Best,
{{Sender.FirstName}}

‍

This is actually surprisingly impressive, to be honest. When you read this email, it's well-written, compelling, and provides tons of value.

Can we improve it further?

An important part of increasing results is AB testing your cold emails. So I'm curious, is there a way we can improve this even further? Well, let's just ask ChatGPT. It may be wrong, but it's possible it generates something worth testing.

Some of the tips they gave are actually pretty great. So let's ask ChatGPT to rewrite the email and to incorporate these tips.

The email doesn't look that much better than the original, but now we have something to AB test against. And although there are some issues with this email copy, there are also some major improvements. The first sentence for example, is far more personal. It shows that you've done research and even reviewed the prospects website, something I recommend doing if you manually personalize a webste.

And although ChatGPT is disconnected from the internet, it will soon be possible to personalize emails based on a companies website, the latest news, or even social profiles with ChatGPT's plugins.

Wrapping Up

Although an experienced cold email writer will most likely out-compete ChatGPT when it comes to writing cold emails, if you're somebody who is new to cold email, ChatGPT can be an amazing resource.

Just keep in mind the prompts that we recommend using above and don't go with the initial email ChatGPT writes, because like we mentioned earlier, without specific instructions, the cold emails ChatGPT outputs are not high-quality cold emails. Good luck!